Formula E Season 5 – new cars, new teams and drivers, new territories

The fifth season of the FIA Formula E Championship will mark the beginning of a new era in the world’s only competition for electric-powered open-wheelers.

Compared to the previous seasons, the biggest change is an introduction of the Gen2 Formula E car. The car has much power (250 kW instead of 200 kW) and is much faster but the most important is that new car could be used for the entire race, so there will no need for a mid-race car-swaps. Formula E will lose one of its unique features but new cars will bring more excitement in racing.

Compared to the Season Four, the championship will be bigger because more teams will compete in more races. The calendar has been expanded from twelve to thirteen races, introducing new territories. The new country that will host Formula E is Saudi Arabia, hosting the season-opening race on December 15. The season will start at the streets of Riyadh.

Other countries are the same as before but some cities are different, with Bern replacing Zurich as a host of the Swiss round and Sanya as a new host of the Chinese round. The championship will return to the iconic street circuit in Monte-Carlo after skipping out the event in 2018.

Formula E calendar is expanded from twelve to thirteen races

2018-2019 Formula E calendar

On the entry list, there will be eleven instead of ten teams as in the previous four seasons. The completely new entrant is the HWA Racelab team. HWA is a well-known company that represents Mercedes for many years in the DTM. Now, a new challenge would be the electric formula racing.

The Renault e.dams team, which won three teams’ titles in the first three season, would be replaced on the grid with Nissan e.dams team, due to strategic reasons inside the French-Japanese alliance. There are some new cooperations between manufacturers and teams so DS and Techeetah will compete together while Virgin Racing made a deal with Audi instead of DS.

Audi will also run its own factory team, operated by Abt Schaeffler. One more German premium manufacturer, the BMW, expanded its involvement into Formula E, incorporating its name to Andretti Motorsport’s squad.

Audi will try to defend Teams’ title in the fifth Formula E season

Seven rookies in the fifth Formula E season

When talking about drivers, all four Formula E champions will be on the grid again with their old teams – Nelson Piquet Jr (Jaguar), Sebastien Buemi (Nissan e.dams), Lucas di Grassi (Audi) and Jean-Eric Vergne (Techeetah).

Among the drivers that will fill up the rest of the grid, there are seven rookies. Formula One veteran Felipe Massa joined Venturi after he spent one season out of racing. HWA will also have former F1 driver Stoffel Vandoorne, plus DTM veteran Gary Paffett.

Another new name coming both from DTM and F1 is Pascal Wehrlein, who joined Mahindra Racing. One more young German who made a step up Formula E is Maximilian Günther, who previously spent one season in the Formula 2. Oliver Rowland is also former F2 racer who already recorded one Formula E start in the second season but now he will compete as a full-time rookie with Nissan e.dams. Finally, an experienced 30-year-old Alexander Sims will add Formula E to his rich CV as a driver of BMW Andretti team.

2018-2019 Formula E entry list